Summary

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You should experiment a little with the custom dialog boxes to get exactly what you want. Look up the default appearance of each custom dialog box in the documentation and then adjust them through their properties. The custom actions you can take based on the user's choice(s) on these custom dialog boxes are quite limited. Some of the dialog boxes allow you to start a custom application. The Register User dialog box, for example, has an Executable property, which you can set to the name of an EXE file. When the user agrees to register the application, the executable is invoked automatically. The Register User dialog box also exposes a property named Arguments, which you can set to a string with arguments to be passed to the executable that will handle the user registration.

Summary

In this chapter you learned the basics of deploying Windows forms applications. The new deployment technique is the Internet-based deployment, which makes the deployment of Windows forms applications as simple as the deployment of WebForms applications. With this type of deployment, nothing is installed at the target machines; applications are downloaded to the clients from a web server and executed. When the application is upgraded, the clients will detect the newer versions at the web server and will download them automatically. Internet-based deployment is also known as no-touch deployment and zero-install/zero-administration deployment, which indicates the expectations of Microsoft for this type of deployment.

Internet-based deployment is a very convenient deployment mechanism in corporate environments, but you have to deal with security issues. As far as the client is concerned, the application is downloaded from the Internet and as such it will be executed in a context of seriously limited privileges. Use the Microsoft .NET Framework Configuration to give the application the proper privileges. If the application doesn't interact with the local resources, then you don't need to assign additional privileges to the application. Web applications don't interact with the local computer's resources and you don't have to fiddle with their security settings. However, if you want to provide a rich user experience by making the most of the client, you must request that your application is executed with additional privileges. Because of this, the Internet-based deployment is best suited for applications that are deployed within a corporation.

The classical deployment method that relies on Windows installer has become a lot more flexible than those with previous versions of Visual Studio. The setup project is part of the solution and you can set up the installation actions with point-and-click operation in the IDE. We've explored the basics of creating Windows setup projects, which should be all you need to deploy an application within a corporate environment.

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